I had to stop and take notice last year when Ward Connerly — the ex-regent for the University of California who has been traveling the country promoting anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives — came to Madison to “testify” at a hearing for the special committee on affirmative action chaired by neoconservative Sen. Glenn Grothman. Connerly is a real “siren song” kind of speaker who comes across as a reasonable person while he sticks the knife in the back of affirmative action. Connerly and others regularly use quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream Speech — especially the part about King’s children not being judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character — and other works in their conservative spin to discredit affirmative action. I would listen and, I have to admit, they almost had me going thinking Dr. King would be against affirmative action today.I had to stop and think “Is this the Dr. King that I have read about my whole life?” It’s almost like someone coming up to you and whispering in your ear that your best friend was somehow someone totally different than the person you knew and there is this thing inside of you — this negative voice — that starts to wonder if it is true.And so, in preparation for this King Holiday, I bought A Testament of Hope and have been reading a lot of Dr. King’s sermons and writings because I didn’t want anyone spinning Dr. King to me. I mean, there is enough spin around the King Holiday that goes on, which makes Dr. King look like a saint as opposed to J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s, who tried to make him look like the devil.I have to admit that a lot of what I know and believe about Dr. King has been through the eyes of others. Now I had read Dr. King’s Dream speech and A Letter from a Birmingham Jail and even his Riverside Church speech when he came out against the Vietnam War. I had seen the newsreels and gazed at the photos. And I have had this somewhat idealized vision of Dr. King based as much on my own hopes and needs as on what Dr. King actually stood for. Most people do that these days. I mean Dr. King was a Baptist minister and was always evoking God and Jesus in his speeches and gave Sunday sermons at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where he was co-pastor with his father, but there are some who almost portray him as atheistic. Ah, we create our gods in our own self-image.Well, the Dr. King I am finding in his writings was truly an idealist and visionary, but he wasn’t anyone’s fool. He was a man who struggled with the threat of violence constantly, who dealt with egos and jealousy within his ranks and disappointment in the lack of Christian vision in many of his fellow ministers. And in spite of all of the earthly things that he constantly had to cope with, Dr. King still kept his “eye on the prize.”And while Dr. King had his Dream of the Beloved Community where race wouldn’t matter anymore, he also knew that we wouldn’t get there without dealing with the legacy and inequalities left behind by slavery. Dr. King’s vision on how to get to a race-neutral Beloved Community wasn’t to say ‘Well, we’re all equal now because we believe we are now equal and we now have a level playing field because we believe it is level.’ Dr. King was no Ward Connerly.Dr King knew that specific steps needed to be taken. He wasn’t out there supporting the striking sanitation workers in Memphis when he was assassinated because he believed that we had now transcended to his Beloved Community. No, he knew it was going to take a lot of hard work and government intervention.In an interview he gave with Playboy Magazine, Dr. King said “All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation. It is an economic fact that a program such as I propose would certainly cost far less than any computation of two centuries of unpaid wages plus accumulated interest … Within common law, we have ample precedents for specific compensatory programs, which are regarded as settlements. American Indians are still being paid for land in a settlement manner. Is not two centuries of labor, which helped to build this country, as real of a commodity?”This sure sounds like advocacy for an affirmative action and a set-aside contract approach to me. Now when I hear Ward Connerly and others use the words of Dr. King in their arguments against affirmative action, I will know them for the disrespectful manipulation of the words of one of the greatest Americans who ever walked this land. I would urge all of you to set aside some time this King Holiday weekend and read some of the works of Dr. King. Get to know him without all of the hype and spin. Get to know him for who he truly was and not what others want him to be. Remember, Celebrate, Act!